TheStar.com - Province heads back to future

Listen up people. We need quiet on the set.
We've got the klieg lights and the cameras and the microphones and a couple of policy wonks and, soon to come, the energy minister himself, Dwight Duncan.
But where oh where are Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox? We are engaged, are we not, in a reprise of Back to the Future?
It sure feels that way.
There was U2 playing in the background yesterday, and then some odd pan flute music, as members of the media were handed packets of information outlining the government's new happy plan for energy. You may have caught wind of it.
The province's future electricity mix, looking out to 2025, will include a doubling of energy capacity drawn from renewable sources. (Applause here.)
And we're going to go big on conservation. (Ditto.)
And we are going to go hard at what has been our collective nuclear headache by moving the province from current installed nuclear capacity of 14,000 megawatts toward a target of, hmm, 14,000 megawatts.
It's a good thing pie charts were involved. Otherwise, the numbers might be hard to parse.
The pie charts help us understand that, while installed nuclear capacity will ultimately remain, hmm, stagnant, the overall impact of nuclear on the energy footprint will lighten.
I can explain that. I can explain that because a bar graph was also involved. By 2025, the energy gap between the province's current capacity and projected demand comes in at an estimated 10,000 megawatts. So, presuming that other energy sources grow as projected (see above), our proportional reliance on nuclear will fall across two decades by 7 per cent.
In the life of a nuclear reactor, or at least the sprightly and lustrous reactors we have built in this province in the past (I'm jesting), 20 years is a heck of a long time. So some might wonder how our plants will be able to hold steady at 14,000 megawatts.
Could you imagine that the answer to the puzzle lies in the words "refurbishment" and "new nukes"?
Why, yes, it does.
As outlined by the energy minister yesterday, the province will be looking at, best case, two new nuclear reactors. (Well, he said "one or two," but two is the correct answer.) The depth of the "new build" project will be predicated upon the feasibility of refurbishing the units we've already got. In other words, if a broad refurbishment proves untenable, the government will look to more new nukes to fill the gap.
Have we not already been down this path?
Of course we have. I will condense it for you, from the January 1997 parachuting in of seven alleged American experts charged with assessing the state of our nuclear fleet to that day when then Hydro chair William Farlinger said the place was run by a cult and that seven of the reactors would have to be laid up.
Oh yes, it's old news. But let's throw a couple of numbers down. One: that the original projection to refit and restart the four Pickering A units was $800 million to $900 million. Two: that by the summer of 2003, the cost of fixing up a single unit had exploded to $1.4 billion. At the end of the adventure we ended up with two of the four old Pickering A nukes back on line.
The other two have been relegated to the dustbin of history.
Yesterday the energy minister said he was proud of the fact that the McGuinty government had brought back Unit 1 at Pickering A on time and on budget. But that accomplishment can't be viewed in isolation from the deep woes experienced on the Pickering site, and the years it took to get operations right.
We can hope that the Pickering mess was anomalous. And we can hope that the go-forward plan will be more fiscally responsible.
But we can't know.
Certainly history does not cast a soft shadow on the decisions the government is moving toward. Sean Conway, who as a Liberal MPP sat on the all-party select committee that adopted the Nuclear Asset Optimization Plan in the fall of 1997, says "I'm from Missouri now on this stuff."
The nuclear plan, drafted by that aforementioned gang of U.S. engineers, would, believed the committee, return the province's plants "to world-class standards in terms of performance and safety in a fiscally and environmentally responsible manner."
Conway has always supported the nuclear option as part of the energy mix. But he was stunned by how dreadfully wrong the process went. "I'm telling you it was a nightmare ... a nightmare against the backdrop of a nightmare.
"I'm very concerned about our ability to manage that technology. ... The public has a right to say, `What kind of assurances are you prepared to give me that you're not going to repeat the mistakes and problems of an earlier time?'"
It has been more than 40 years since construction started at Pickering. Nuclear bloomed in this province, becoming the backbone of its energy system. But the reactors never truly flourished, and repeatedly proved to be chronic underperformers. Assessing whether those same reactors can be made to extend their lives as reliable providers of baseload capacity is now the job of Ontario Power Generation. OPG has been charged, too, with kicking off the approval process for the new nukes.
Dwight Duncan describes the province's future commitment to nuclear as "modest." That would seem to ignore opportunity cost — the dollars lost to, say, renewables, by directing them into nuclear. It certainly ignores the costs of decommissioning and the disposal of spent fuel rods.
Additional articles by Jennifer Wells

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